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Nate Silver 'disruptive' at Times, public editor says

By Dylan Byers

07/22/13 02:59 PM EDT

Nate Silver, the star political statistician, was a "disruptive" outsider at The New York Times, his work disliked by some of his colleagues.

That's according to the Times' own public editor, Margaret Sullivan, who today offered a strikingly honest assessment about the newsroom's attitudes toward a colleague she otherwise described as kind and "thoroughly decent."

"I don’t think Nate Silver ever really fit into the Times culture and I think he was aware of that," Sullivan wrote on her blog today. "A number of traditional and well-respected Times journalists disliked his work."

The news comes as Silver prepares to move from the Times to ESPN and ABC News, where he has been promised extensive air time, a role in the Oscars, and a digital empire that will focus primarily on sports but also politics, economics, and other topics.

"I suspect that this question of feeling at home in the Times culture was a relatively small factor, and that money, prestige and the opportunity to concentrate on sports and entertainment, rather than politics, were the deciding factors," Sullivan wrote. "But it all added up to a better package – a better fit — at ESPN, and last week he told The Times of his plans."

Comparing Silver to Brad Pitt's character in Moneyball, Sullivan writes that Silver's "entire probability-based way of looking at politics ran against the kind of political journalism that The Times specializes in: polling, the horse race, campaign coverage, analysis based on campaign-trail observation, and opinion writing, or 'punditry,' as he put it, famously describing it as 'fundamentally useless.'" (Silver has leveled similar criticisms of horse-race journalism at POLITICO.)

After writing a supportive column about Silver, Sullivan says she received emails from "three high-profile Times political journalists, criticizing him and his work. They were also tough on me for seeming to endorse what he wrote, since I was suggesting that it get more visibility."

While some (including herself) would be sad to see Silver go, Sullivan said that "some at The Times" would be "gratified by his departure."